A major obstacle to sustainable ecosystem management is the high cost and difficulty of observing organisms at large in their environments. This is particularly challenging for birds, mammals, and fish that move widely. Fortunately, tracking technologies to monitor animals are rapidly advancing, providing new data streams to assess the ecology of organisms. Brooklyn College’s Suresh A. Sethi, director of the Aquatic Research and Environmental Assessment Center and associate professor of Earth and environmental science, is advancing data science tools to harness tagging data to support fish and wildlife population assessments. Sethi and an international team of collaborators, spanning universities and government agencies from the United States, Canada, Norway, Portugal, and Spain, have developed a suite of new modeling approaches to estimate the survival of tagged animals across space and over time. Their work has been published in a trio of papers over the past year in the prestigious journals Scientific Reports and Methods in Ecology and Evolution: In Koeberle et al. (2023), the authors demonstrate how miniaturized tagging technology can be used to estimate the survival of small juvenile fish. In Sethi et al. (2024), the authors break down survival over time into sequential stages that can reflect complex injury and recovery dynamics of fish and wildlife. In Poulton et al. (2024), the authors develop spatial models that can characterize mortality risks for fish and wildlife across landscapes and seascapes. While the team’s work is focused on animal populations, these data science approaches represent general advancements in survival modeling that can support a wide range of applications, including uses in medical science, economics, and engineering. Their work is already making impacts, with new collaborations underway to estimate survival of fish through dams, to assess the ability of marine reserves to protect fish populations, and to assess handling injuries for game birds.
